The most widely used method for amplification of specific sequences from within a population of nucleic acid sequences is that of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) (Dieffenbach C and Dveksler G eds. PCR Primer: A Laboratory Manual. Cold Spring Harbor Press, Plainview N.Y.). In this amplification method, oligonucleotides, generally 15 to 30 nucleotides in length on complementary strands and at either end of the region to be amplified, are used to prime DNA synthesis on denatured single-stranded DNA templates. Successive cycles of denaturation, primer hybridisation and DNA strand synthesis using thermostable DNA polymerases allows exponential amplification of the sequences between the primers. RNA sequences can be amplified by first copying using reverse transcriptase to produce a cDNA copy. Amplified DNA fragments can be detected by a variety of means including gel electrophoresis, hybridisation with labelled probes, use of tagged primers that allow subsequent identification (e.g. by an enzyme linked assay), use of fluorescently-tagged primers that give rise to a signal upon hybridisation with the target DNA (e.g. Beacon and TaqMan systems).
One disadvantage of PCR is the need of a thermocycler to heat and cool the amplification mixture to denature the DNA. This, amplification cannot be carried out in primitive sites or operated easily outside of a laboratory environment.
As well as PCR, a variety of other techniques have been developed for detection and amplification of specific sequences. One example is the ligase chain reaction (Barany F Genetic disease detection and DNA amplification using cloned thermostable ligase. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 88:189-193 (1991)).
In addition to conventional methods of DNA amplification that rely on the thermal denaturation of the target during the amplification reaction, a number of methods have been described that do not require template denaturation during the amplification reaction and are thus termed isothermal amplification technologies.
Isothermal amplification was first described in 1992 (Walker G T, Little M C, Nadeau J G and Shank D. Isothermal in vitro amplification of DNA by a restriction enzyme/DNA polymerase system. PNAS 89: 392-396 (1992) and termed Strand Displacement Amplification (SDA). Since then, a number of other isothermal amplification technologies have been described including Transcription Mediated Amplification (TMA) and Nucleic Acid Sequence Based Amplification (NASBA) that use an RNA polymerase to copy RNA sequences but not corresponding genomic DNA (Guatelli J C, Whitfield K M, Kwoh D Y, Barringer K J, Richmann D D and Gingeras T R. Isothermal, in vitro amplification of nucleic acids by a multienzyme reaction modeled after retroviral replication. PNAS 87: 1874-1878 (1990): Kievits T, van Gemen B, van Strijp D, Schukkink R, Dircks M, Adriaanse H, Malek L, Sooknanan R, Lens P. NASBA isothermal enzymatic in vitro nucleic acid amplification optimized for the diagnosis of HIV-1 infection. J Virol Methods. 1991 December; 35(3):273-86).
Other DNA-based isothermal techniques include Rolling Circle Amplification (RCA) in which a DNA polymerase extends a primer directed to a circular template (Fire A and Xu SQ. Rolling replication of short circles. PNAS 92: 4641-4645 (1995), Ramification Amplification (RAM) that uses a circular probe for target detection (Zhang W, Cohenford M, Lentrichia B, Isenberg H D, Simson E, Li H, Yi J, Zhang D Y. Detection of Chlamydia trachomatis by isothermal ramification amplification method: a feasibility study. J Clin Microbiol. 2002 January; 40(1):128-32.) and more recently, Helicase-Dependent isothermal DNA amplification (HDA), that uses a helicase enzyme to unwind the DNA strands instead of heat (Vincent M, Xu Y, Kong H. Helicase-dependent isothermal DNA amplification. EMBO Rep. 2004 August; 5(8):795-800.)
Recently, isothermal methods of DNA amplification have been described (Walker G T, Little M C, Nadeau J G and Shank D. Isothermal in vitro amplification of DNA by a restriction enzyme/DNA polymerase system. PNAS 89: 392-396 (1992). Traditional amplification techniques rely on continuing cycles of denaturation and renaturation of the target molecules at each cycle of the amplification reaction. Heat treatment of DNA results in a certain degree of shearing of DNA molecules, thus when DNA is limiting such as in the isolation of DNA from a small number of cells from a developing blastocyst, or particularly in cases when the DNA is already in a fragmented form, such as in tissue sections, paraffin blocks and ancient DNA samples, this heating-cooling cycle could further damage the DNA and result in loss of amplification signals. Isothermal methods do not rely on the continuing denaturation of the template DNA to produce single stranded molecules to serve as templates from further amplification, but rely on enzymatic nicking of DNA molecules by specific restriction endonucleases at a constant temperature.
The technique termed Strand Displacement Amplification (SDA) relies on the ability of certain restriction enzymes to nick the unmodified strand of hemi-modified DNA and the ability of a 5′-3′ exonuclease-deficient polymerase to extend and displace the downstream strand. Exponential amplification is then achieved by coupling sense and antisense reactions in which strand displacement from the sense reaction serves as a template for the antisense reaction (Walker G T, Little M C, Nadeau J G and Shank D. Isothermal in vitro amplification of DNA by a restriction enzyme/DNA polymerase system. PNAS 89: 392-396 (1992). Such techniques have been used for the successful amplification of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Walker G T, Little M C, Nadeau J G and Shank D. Isothermal in vitro amplification of DNA by a restriction enzyme/DNA polymerase system. PNAS 89: 392-396 (1992), HIV-1, Hepatitis C and HPV-16 Nuovo G. J., 2000), Chlamydia trachomatis (Spears P A, Linn P, Woodard D L and Walker G T. Simultaneous Strand Displacement Amplification and Fluorescence Polarization Detection of Chlamydia trachomatis. Anal. Biochem. 247: 130-137 (1997).
The use of SDA to date has depended on modified phosphorthioate nucleotides in order to produce a hemi-phosphorthioate DNA duplex that on the modified strand would be resistant to enzyme cleavage, resulting in enzymic nicking instead of digestion to drive the displacement reaction. Recently, however, several “nickase” enzyme have been engineered. These enzymes do not cut DNA in the traditional manner but produce a nick on one of the DNA strands. “Nickase” enzymes include N.Alw1 (Xu Y, Lunnen K D and Kong H. Engineering a nicking endonuclease N.Alw1 by domain swapping. PNAS 98: 12990-12995 (2001), N.BstNB1 (Morgan R D, Calvet C, Demeter M, Agra R, Kong H. Characterization of the specific DNA nicking activity of restriction endonuclease N.BstNBI. Biol. Chem. 2000 November; 381(11):1123-5.) and Mly1 (Besnier C E, Kong H. Converting MlyI endonuclease into a nicking enzyme by changing its oligomerization state. EMBO Rep. 2001 September; 2(9):782-6. Epub 2001 Aug. 23). The use of such enzymes would thus simplify the SDA procedure.
In addition, SDA has been improved by the use of a combination of a heat stable restriction enzyme (Ava1) and Heat stable Exo-polymerase (Bst polymerase). This combination has been shown to increase amplification efficiency of the reaction from a 108 fold amplification to 1010 fold amplification so that it is possible using this technique to amplify unique single copy molecules. The resultant amplification factor using the heat stable polymerase/enzyme combination is in the order of 109 (Milla M. A., Spears P., A., Pearson R. E. and Walker G. T. Use of the Restriction Enzyme Ava1 and Exo-Bst Polymerase in Strand Displacement Amplification Biotechniques 1997 24:392-396.)
To date, all isothermal DNA amplification techniques require the initial double stranded template DNA molecule to be denatured prior to the initiation of amplification. In addition, amplification is only initiated once from each priming event.
The present inventors have now developed amplification methods which utilise enzymes and primers and do not require repeated temperature cycling.